Asset managers continue to be more positive on social media

Managers posted more on social media during Q4, but engagement levels were down compared to Q3, according to research by Fundamental Media

Key points:

• In Q4 2023, asset managers’ social media posts had an average sentiment of 1.14, while the average engagement was 56.2 per post.
• Engagement levels changed significantly during Q4 for YouTube, which started at an average of 95 in October and grew further to 101.55 in November (the highest level seen in 2023) to then drop sharply to 48.9 in December.
• The topics expert views, ESG and market were the most frequently posted about by asset managers in Q4 as well as in all other quarters of 2023.

Asset managers were again more positive on social media than in the previous quarter, research by Fundamental Media found. Where the average sentiment of their posts stood at 0.91 in Q2 2023, it had increased to 1.08 a quarter later and to 1.14 in Q4.

We analysed a total of 4,156 organic social media posts of 43 leading asset managers during Q4, including 3,327 LinkedIn posts, and compared them to Q3 2023. In the third quarter, asset managers posted 3,979 times on social media, including 3,211 times on LinkedIn.

In Q4, the posts had an average sentiment of 1.14, while the average engagement was 56.2 per post. This compares to an average sentiment of 1.08 and average engagement of 64.6 in Q3. Sentiment is measured by looking at the number of negative and positive words used in the posts, while the engagement rate is the number of likes, clicks, video views, shares and comments a post has received.

The number of posts on all social media channels did not fluctuate much during the last six months of 2023. LinkedIn continues to be the most popular channel for asset managers, with more than 1,000 posts a month, reaching 1,212 posts in October. October was also the busiest month for asset managers on YouTube with 168 videos posted, up from 105 in September.

Engagement levels changed significantly during Q4 for YouTube, which started at an average of 95 in October and grew further to 101.55 in November (the highest level seen in 2023) to then drop sharply to 48.9 in December. However, this is still higher than most other months in 2023 and significantly more than the engagement levels achieved in July. The last quarter of 2023 saw little movement in engagement levels for LinkedIn and Facebook posts.

Asset managers were very positive on social media during Q4, with average sentiment on Facebook and LinkedIn being above 1 during every month, except for LinkedIn in December. Earlier in 2023 asset managers were less positive, especially on Facebook, which saw quite big spikes in sentiment in the first half of the year and a low of 0.45 in March.

LinkedIn engagement

Focusing only on asset managers’ LinkedIn activity, we see that they posted the most about the topics expert views, ESG and market during Q4. These topics were the most frequently posted about by asset managers in all four quarters of 2023.

The topic cryptocurrencies received the highest level of engagement at an average of 36.04 versus the mean engagement by asset manager and month, with 18 posts on the topic. This was followed by ETFs (an average of 34.53 across 71 posts), conflict (an average of 31.67 across 36 posts) and Middle East (an average of 26.1 across 12 posts). These topics have all been excluded from the above chart for legibility reasons. Similar to Q3, the topic with least engagement was tax with an average engagement of -24.12 across 35 posts.

During Q4 overall, asset managers posted the most about expert views, but looking at the data month by month, we can see that most posts on expert views are from December, while the most popular topic in October was ESG. In December, the second most popular topic was economy, followed by market, with ESG only in fourth place.

Posts on the topic expert views that performed well during Q4 include outlooks on the stock and bond markets and a whitepaper on water scarcity. Posts on ESG that received high levels of engagement included new fund launches and a celebratory post on U.S. Veterans Day.